


On alternate universes and tipping points.

by chrundletheokay



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: All hurt no comfort, CSA, Charlie and Dee but not Chardee, Gen, Past Rape, Past Sexual Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, after what happened in Misses The Boat and Time's Up, it really just deals with Charlie's feelings re: Dee, my brain regularly likes to make me freak out about this, post "The Gang Misses the Boat", post "Time's Up for the Gang", so I write fic about it, this is not a fun one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-03
Updated: 2019-10-03
Packaged: 2020-11-22 23:26:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20882411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chrundletheokay/pseuds/chrundletheokay
Summary: "If there’s a point you pass, where you flip over into success, does it work the opposite way? Is there a tipping point where it all goes to shit? And if so, what was it for them? When did they all become so irredeemably fucked-up?"[This is definitely not a fun one. It takes place after / refers to events in “Misses the Boat” and “Time’s Up.”]





	On alternate universes and tipping points.

**Author's Note:**

> [TW: rape and childhood sexual abuse.]
> 
> [Nothing explicit described about the actual act(s), but lots of in-depth introspection in the aftermath of it — including victim-blaming/self-blaming, PTSD symptoms, and Charlie feeling unsafe around Dee. Please read with caution, esp. if you have a history of trauma, or if this content is typically triggering or upsetting for you. Seriously, this isn't a fun one.]
> 
> [also TW: emetophobia, canon-typical substance abuse]
> 
> (If this looks familiar, it's because I posted it on tumblr almost two months ago.)

When Charlie emerges from the basement, he’s startled nearly out of his mind to find that he’s no longer alone in the bar. It was nearly eight o’clock in the morning, last he checked. He expected to be alone. He _was_ alone.

“Aw, Jesus fucking _shit_,” he shrieks, clutching a hand to his rapidly-beating heart. “Dee, what the fuck, dude?”

It’s not so much that she’s there; it’s that he wasn’t expecting her.

Okay, it is _a little bit_ that she’s there. If Charlie were to make a list of people he wanted to see right now, Dee wouldn’t be anywhere near the top.

And yet, there she is.

She looks up at him with bleary, red-rimmed eyes, and an ugly frown creasing her face. Her head is propped up on one hand, her elbow resting on the bar’s surface. It’s just like her to settle in there, smudging up the bar and spilling booze all over it, right after Charlie worked so hard to disinfect and polish it.

Her gaze slowly focuses as she regards Charlie. “What?” she demands at last. “I work here, same as you.”

“You’re not _working;_ you’re drinking. It’s eight in the goddamn morning, what possible reason could you have to—?”

“Me?! It’s eight in the goddamn morning, Charlie,” she fires back, just as snippily. “Couldn’t the rat traps wait another couple of hours? Or are you that lonely? Thought you’d come in for a little company?”

Charlie’s heart skips a beat.

“Not enough rats for you back at your apartment?”

“The alleycats are on strike,” Charlie lies. “They formed a union, but it’s fine.” He’s not entirely sure what he’s saying or if it bears any relevance to this conversation, but anything to fill the silence. Anything but the truth.

Dee narrows her eyes at him but doesn’t say anything for an unbearably long moment.

Charlie squirms under her gaze. Even wearing his baggiest hoodie, zipped all the way up to his neck, he feels uncomfortably naked. For a terrifying second, he worries that she can see right through his skull and into the shadows of the nightmare that still lingers there. Like maybe that’s what she’s trying to see, examining his face so closely. But that’s stupid. People can’t see inside your head, or hear your thoughts; Mac says so.

“Have you been sleeping in the bar again, Charlie?” she asks at last.

“No! I’m not—I wasn’t—I don’t do that anymore!”

It’s _almost_ true, if you stretch the definition of truth, or the meaning of words like “anymore.” Charlie hasn’t slept in the bar since about a week or two ago — it was a long night, Frank had a hooker over, and the two of them got far too loud. Charlie couldn’t pretend not to hear, even hiding in the closet. Even with earplugs in. Even sitting out in the hallway.

His heart wouldn’t stop racing, and he couldn’t figure out why. All he knew was that he needed to get out, to run, to not be anywhere near his apartment. To not be anywhere near sober.

So yeah, he slept in the bar. So what? It was one night, and he hasn’t done it since then. And he won’t do it again, not until it gets too bad again. Therefore, it’s not a lie — he’s stopped _for now._ He doesn’t do that anymore. _For now._

“Because we’ve talked about this,” Dee warns him.

“I wasn’t sleeping in the bar! I wasn’t sleeping anywhere, you goddamn bitch!”

And that’s the fucking truth, and fuck Dee for picking at him till he let it out.

“Jesus, calm down,” she snarls.

The truth is, the nightmares got worse after the fake sexual harassment seminar, and wasn’t that just a bitch? Seeing Dee in his waking hours, and now seeing her in his dreams?

In dreams she reaches her clawed talons down his throat and rips out his soul entirely. Night after night. It used to only be every few months, but now—

Knowing what happened is entirely different from speaking the words aloud. It’s the difference between keeping a secret that’s making you sick, and announcing one of your most shameful memories to a roomful of strangers.

There’s the fear that everyone can see the secret in your face, in every movement of your body; and then there’s speaking it aloud, and when people look at you, they know it without a doubt. And now you know that they know. And all you want to do is curl up and hide, because you feel so naked, so ugly.

Above all, there is one place where Charlie keeps getting stuck, and it is this: There is a world of difference between having the vague awareness that what happened was Pretty Bad, and being told that it wasn’t just bad — it was rape.

It’s harder to ignore, after that.

On bad days, he looks at Frank and Mac and Dennis, and he wants to crawl into a hole and die. Because now they know, too. Knowing it himself was bad enough. Dee knowing was especially disgusting — this secret between them that he never wanted to have. Wondering if she remembered it every time she looked at him, the way he so often did when he looked at her.

All that was bad enough. Having Mac and Dennis know? And facing the disgust they didn’t even bother to hide when they found out?

There was a reason he didn’t tell.

A lot of reasons, really.

Dee is never going anywhere, and he knows that. The guys know it, too. She’s never going anywhere, and they’re never going to talk about it again. When Charlie lets himself really look at that, and think about it, it hurts in its own way. Like it didn’t matter. Or it _can’t _matter.

So he tries to reason it out. Day after day, week after month after year.

It was Bad, this thing that happened between him and Dee. But they’ve all done bad things. He’s done plenty of bad things to Dee, probably, even if he can’t think of any.

Okay, so maybe this was an entirely different magnitude of bad. So what? What are they going to do? Kick Dee out of the gang? Exile her? Never speak to her again? Call the police? Stuff her into a canon and fire her off into the surface of the sun, where she’ll burn up forever, and no one will hear her screaming for help?

None of that will ever happen. Charlie knew that as soon as it was over, and Dee told him to get out of her apartment. Of _course_ he never said anything. Why would he say anything? It would’ve been stupid to do so.

Dee is crazy smart, is the thing. Sure, she lacks common sense, but all the smartest people do. After all, Albert Einstein never learned how to tie his shoes. He didn’t know how to use numbers properly, so he inserted random letters into his math equations. Steve Jobs built his first computer out of apples, and who does that? It worked out in the end.

The point is this: the guys don’t give Dee credit for being smarter than they are. He can’t figure why, except that the idea of a woman being intelligent isn’t in the realm of possibilities for them. When the guys aren’t around, when it’s just Dee and Charlie, or when it’s just her and Charlie’s hiding in the vents or listening in from the basement—

Dennis is absolute _shit_ at doing inventory. When no one is looking, Dee goes back and corrects his work. Once at a party, shortly before Dee was kicked out of Penn, she did this crazy math — all in her head, right there in front of him. Something about beer and vodka, and percentage alcohol by volume, versus blood alcohol content. Charlie had been too high to follow — not to mention bad at math, even while sober — but it blew his mind. Years later, he still thinks about it every now and then.

So he wants to ask her. To pick her brain sometime.

Like, _Hey Dee,_ he wants to ask, _have you ever heard about that theory where there’s an infinite number of universes, and we just happen to be living in one of them? Is that shit real?_

There are other questions, too.

Like are tipping points actually real? If there’s a point you pass, where you flip over into success, does it work the opposite way? Is there a tipping point where it all goes to shit? And if so, what was it for them? Not just as a group, but individually?

When did they all become so irredeemably fucked-up?

When did Paddy’s lose the potential to become a commercially viable bar, and transform into nothing more than a front for Frank’s money laundering schemes and their raging alcoholism?

When did things become so bad they couldn’t be fixed anymore? Because it must have happened long before Dee had him pinned down in her apartment that night.

Is there a universe out there somewhere where they _didn’t_ tip in the bad direction? One where Mac came out early, and Dennis didn’t go back in the closet after Penn? One where the two of them are happy and in love together? Is there a universe where Charlie doesn’t have nightmares? Where the Bad Stuff with Uncle Jack never happened?

Better yet, what if there’s a universe where he never met Uncle Jack? Where his mother was an only child? That one hit Charlie at three in the morning recently, as he leaned over his and Frank’s barf bucket, a combination of a gruesome nightmare and an expired can of cat food turning his stomach inside out.

What if there’s a universe where he doesn’t know the feeling of Dee’s long fingers shoved in his mouth? Where he doesn’t have the knowledge that being trapped, being pinned down, is just as terrifying at forty years old as it ever was? Maybe even worse, in some ways, because _you’re a grown-up now, Charlie. Isn’t this supposed to get easier? Isn’t this supposed to stop happening?_

That’s what he keeps asking himself that, but that’s a question he can’t ask Dee.

Dee would say _it doesn’t keep happening._ But she’s wrong, because it _does,_ in his head. It happened, and it always will have happened. He can’t scrub that memory from his own brain, and he knows because he’s tried. He certainly can’t wipe that knowledge out of the minds of his friends, now that they know.

He keeps wondering why he said anything at all. Maybe he just felt backed into a corner, drunk, and impulsive.

Whenever people go on the news to talk about being raped by politicians and other important people, everyone says _why didn’t she say something sooner?_ It’s almost always a “she,” too. If he didn’t know about Dennis, he might think—

But it doesn’t matter. The real question, Charlie thinks, is: “Why did she say anything at all?” You’re not supposed to say anything. You’re not supposed to tell. You swallow the secret, and when you die, they bury it with you in your grave.

(Sometimes, it doesn’t work that way. Sometimes people pry open your mouth and try to rip the secret out from you, even when you tell them _no._ Even when you tell them _stop._)

(Maybe in another universe no one knows, not even Charlie.)

“Do you ever think about alternate universes?” Charlie says, maybe five or six beers later. He’s lost count, but it doesn’t matter; it hasn’t mattered in a long time. He’s also lost count of how many cigarettes Dee has shared with him, but he thinks this is his second or third. She’s never been that generous.

The words feel big and clumsy in his mouth, awkward and heavy as they fall out amid a faint plume of smoke. He didn’t even realize he was going to say them until the sentence is halfway out of his mouth. Sometimes he wishes he sounded more like Dennis when he talks: smooth and confident, not stupid and stilted.

When Dee turns to look at him, it isn’t to answer. It’s to give him her patented _Charlie, you’re an idiot_ facial expression.

“That’s a weed question, Charlie,” she responds at last. “You know this isn’t weed, right?”

“Course I know it’s not weed. What kind of an idiot do you think I am?”

Dee shrugs. “Whatever. It’s like, who gives a shit?” She takes a long drag off her own cigarette.

_Me_, Charlie wants to answer. And he would, except that giving a shit is about the least cool thing a person can do. Either way, that wasn’t the answer he was hoping for. _You can do better than that,_ he wants to say, but giving Dee credit for anything would be Breaking the Rules.

Dee puffs out a big cloud of smoke, then clears her throat. With her nails painted black and the cigarette smoke coming out of her mouth, she looks like like a dragon. A dragon that could eat Charlie whole if she wanted.

“It’s not like it matters. It’s basically all theoretical at this point,” Dee explains. “I figure, like—” She takes another thoughtful drag, and turns her head to blow the smoke away from Charlie’s face “—we’re here, right? What’s it matter how many universes there are, if this is the one we’re stuck in?”

Charlie swallows hard. He doesn’t know why. There’s no beer in his mouth. No paint, no cheese, no cat food. No fingers. Nothing. There’s nothing.

“Dee,” he starts. And he doesn’t know where to go from there.

Dee is watching him with skeptical eyes, like maybe she thinks he’s finally lost it.

“I think I’m sick,” he concludes. It’s not entirely true, but maybe it isn’t a lie, either. “I think I’m gonna go home. Tell—Tell the guys for me, yeah?”

Dee mumbles an incoherent response — something between _yeah _and _whatever_, if Charlie had to guess. Mac was always better at taking shitty non-answers and extrapolating whatever he wanted to hear out of them.

When Charlie gets home, he crawls into The Crevice. He imagines he might sleep there for the rest of eternity, if at all possible.

In actuality, he wakes up three or four hours later with Frank, who refuses to buy his line about being sick.

“C’mon,” Frank chides him. “We got shit to do. Get up.” And he hands Charlie a beer and a couple slices of ham and cheese for breakfast, and drags him to the bar before Charlie can protest further.

Charlie steals Dee’s cigarettes when she isn’t looking, and slinks off down to the basement. It feels like a good day to drink blue paint and chainsmoke, and to perfect his design for a new rat trap.

The gang shoots the shit upstairs, leaving him to his work. Their voices filter down through the loose floorboards, the creaking basement door. The bickering and teasing and laughing remind Charlie that he still exists in a world outside his of own head. But the distance — being alone but not alone — means he doesn’t have to bear the feeling of being seen.

He doesn’t have to worry about the nightmares still trying to play out on the movie screen inside his mind. He doesn’t have to worry that the phantom images might shoot out of his eyeballs, to play there on his face for everyone to see, like the world’s worst movie projector.

No, none of that.

In fact, there are enough chemicals running through his system that Charlie can let himself forget about nearly everything. He won’t let himself worry about last night’s nightmares, or tonight’s pending nightmares, or alternate universes, or tipping points, or any of that shit. Everything else can be pushed aside for now. Just for today.

Because right now? It’s just him and this raccoon trap. Well, a raccoon trap, a roll of chicken wire, a plastic kid’s toy in the shape of a wedge of cheese, a blueprint drawn in crayon, a homemade cat-shaped ashtray, and a gallon of blue paint.

And Dee’s voice overhead, screeching, “Goddamnit, who took my cigarettes?”

**Author's Note:**

> sorry.


End file.
